Poverty

Campaign For Living Wage Readies National Push

January 3, 2014 Jon Queally, www.commondreams.org Organize! Poverty, Worker Rights and Jobs

Following the victory of a $15 established hourly wage in the Washington state city of Seatac in November, coupled with the win of Kshama Sawant who ran for Seattle City Council as a Socialist Alternative candidate and a growing national movement led by low-wage retail and fast-food workers, organizers behind the '15Now Campaign' think the moment is now right to connect those across the country who are boldly calling for such an increase. “Good jobs are disappearing while the wealthiest 1% are taking an unprecedented share of the national income," says Sawant who plans to fight for the $15 wage in Seattle where newly elected Mayor Ed Murray has also endorsed the idea.

Hidden From Sight: Women In Extreme Poverty Rising

December 26, 2013 Ruth Rosen, www.alternet.org Educate! Poverty, Women's Rights

Meanwhile, poverty grows, the stock market zooms to new heights, the wealth of the one percent increases, and corporate executives continue to get tax exemptions for business entertainment expenses, which allow corporations to deduct 50 percent of these costs from their annual taxes. In all this discussion, the real face of poverty — single mothers — has strangely disappeared. Welfare policy in America has always favored mothers and children. In a country that values self-sufficiency and glorifies individualism, Americans have viewed men — except war veterans — as capable of caring for themselves, or part of the undeserving poor. Women, by contrast, were always viewed as mothers with dependents, people to be cared for and protected precisely because they are vulnerable and raise the next generation.

Salvation Army Bell Ringers Are Lowest Paid Employees

December 25, 2013 Kathleen Jercich, www.inthesetimes.com Educate! Poverty, Worker Rights and Jobs

When the weather dips below freezing in Chicago, most of the city’s residents do their level best to stay indoors as much as possible. But there’s one group of people who continue to stand outside, braving biting winds and bone-chilling temperatures to ring bells asking for donations: the roughly 2,000 Salvation Army “bell ringers.” According to Major Greg Thompson, general secretary for the Salvation Army Metropolitan Division, Chicago’s “red kettle campaign” brought in $2.4 million last year during the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Salvation Army depends on that money for its charity work, which includes youth tutoring, residences for low-income adults, meals for the needy elderly and prayer meetings. In some locations, Thompson says, kettle campaigns have supplemented up to 40 percent of the next year’s programming.

The Year In Inequality: Lots Of Words, Where’s Action?

December 25, 2013 Peter Moskowitz, www.america.aljazeera.com Educate! Austerity, Finance and the Economy, Inequality, Poverty

In other words, the concept of inequality was so popular in 2013, because 2013 was a year of near-unprecedented income inequality. This year, there were revelations that median wages have remained flat for 10 years, that corporations continued to receive record-breaking tax breaks, that CEO pay has risen astronomically in the past few decades, and that the bottom and top income brackets continue togrow further apart. While there were some minor policy changes passed that could help lessen that gap — such as many local minimum-wage campaigns; there were many, such as repeated cuts to food stamps andunemployment benefits, that seem to promise to widen the chasm further.

Inequality: Government Is Perp, Not A Bystander

December 24, 2013 Dean Baker, www.truthout.org Educate! Austerity, Finance and the Economy, Government, Poverty

In his speech on inequality earlier this month President Obama proclaimed that the government could not be a bystander in the effort to reduce inequality, which he described as the defining moral issue of our time. This left millions convinced that Obama would do nothing to lessen inequality. The problem is that President Obama wants the public to believe that inequality is something that just happened. It turns out that the forces of technology, globalization, and whatever else simply made some people very rich and left others working for low wages or out of work altogether. The president and other like-minded people feel a moral compulsion to reverse the resulting inequality. This story is 180 degrees at odds with the reality. Inequality did not just happen, it was deliberately engineered through a whole range of policies intended to redistribute income upward.

Video: Drones in Yemen, Hunger Games In America & Corporate Espionage

December 14, 2013 Dennis Trainor, Jr., www.AcronymTV.com Resistance Report Corporate Personhood, Democracy, Drones, NSA, Poverty, Privacy, Surveillance

On this episode of The Resistance Report: 1. Dennis Trainor, Jr. talks about the 15 innocent people in Yemen who were killed Thursday by a U.S. Drone attack. The 15 homicide victims will be called collateral damage, and yet we are not at war with Yemen. 2. We hear the haunting yet absurd steps taken by the NSA to monitor citizens. Unfortunately for activists, revolutionaries, and other agents of social change, that’s only the “state” prong of surveillance. The corporate arm is much more damning. 3. Donald Sutherland, who stars in the Hunger Games Franchise, wants to see a revolution that brings about the end of the American Empire, and he wants the Hunger Games movies to be a spark for that flame. 4. A group called We the People Maine went to the State House on Wednesday to deliver a formal request for the Legislature to apply for a Constitutional Convention of States to overturn Citizens United and establish that “corporations are not people and money is not speech.”

Two Parties, One Game: Obama’s War On The Poor

December 12, 2013 Pascal Robert, www.blackagendareport.com Educate! Poverty, Racism

In the constant con game of American two party politics, the suffering masses are forced to swallow images of the Republicans as reactionary racists and Democrats as the sound defenders of the working class and people of color. The reality is that both parties are completely beholden to the forces of oppression that have ground the working class and people of color to dust for ages in this Country. This tired political charade lets Democrats cast themselves as the safe haven for Black and brown people by doing nothing more than pointing at “those evil Republicans” who want to deport you or send you back to the plantation in shackles. The truth is that today’s American political establishment on both sides is designed to protect the interests of big corporations, the monied elite, and Wall Street. Democrats, not Republicans passed Bill Clinton's crime bill, stepping up black mass incarceration to levels even higher than Reagan and Bush before him. Bill Clinton and Democrats repaid the black votes they received by leading the charge to augment drug sentences, disproportionately affecting people of color.

VIDEO: Protesters Demand Peoples Budget: “We Are Hungry”

December 12, 2013 Dennis Trainor, Jr., www.AcronymTV.wordpress.com Resist! Finance and the Economy, Food and Agriculture, Government, Human Rights, Poverty, Video

Only hours before Paul Ryan and Patty Murray announced that they reached a two year budget agreement (The BiPartisan Budget Act of 2013), representatives from a broad coalition demanding a budget that would cut military expenditures in order to increase funding for a wide range of domestic programs called on Congressional leaders to craft a budget for people, peace and the planet. Now, because this broad coalition included over a hundred peace, anti-hunger, anti-poverty, environmental and community groups it is almost universally ignored within the walls of Congress. That is one reason why part of that call came in the form of an unscheduled visit to the office of Paul Ryan and Patty Murray.

Student Loan Debt Hits New High, Jobs At ‘Poverty Wages’

December 9, 2013 Jana Kasperkevic, www.theguardian.com Educate! Education, Finance and the Economy, Poverty

The class of 2012 has the highest student loan burden of any graduating college class in history, continuing a five-year trend of rising debt loads on millennials just coming out of school. The average student debt load made a big jump in the past year, from $26,600 in 2011 to $29,400 in 2012, according to the Project on Student Debt at The Institute for College Access and Success. It's increasingly rare for students to get out of college without student loan debt. Of 1,075 private and public colleges, 42 reported that more than 90% of their graduating class are leaving college with some student debt – meaning the vast majority of their students had to take loans to graduate. Meanwhile, 122 colleges reported the average debt per student is more than $35,000. Overall, currently only three out of every 10 US graduates are graduating without debt.

VIDEO: The Pathology Of The Rich

December 8, 2013 Paul Jay, www.therealnews.com Educate! Corporatism, Finance and the Economy, Greed, Poverty, Video

Because we don't understand the pathology of the rich. We've been saturated with cultural images and a kind of cultural deification of wealth and those who have wealth. We are being--you know, they present people of immense wealth as somehow leaders--oracles, even. And we don't grasp internally what it is an oligarchic class is finally about or how venal and morally bankrupt they are. We need to recover the language of class warfare and grasp what is happening to us, and we need to shatter this self-delusion that somehow if, as Obama says, we work hard enough and study hard enough, we can be one of them. The fact is, the people who created the economic mess that we're in were the best-educated people in the country--Larry Summers, a former president of Harvard, and others. The issue is not education. The issue is greed.

Criminalizing Homelessness

December 7, 2013 M Caulfield, www.exposingthetruth.co Educate! Housing, Human Rights, Poverty

Recently, one family in Atlanta, Georgia decided that they were going to turn their unlucky situation into a beautiful one: to be a blessing to the lives of others by doing something good for those less fortunate in their community. Carol and Willie Fowler’s daughter Tamara had planned to get married at the Villa Christina catering hall, but the wedding was unexpectedly called off just 40 days before the event was slated to take place. At the initial news, the family was understandably upset that the planned celebration was not going to happen. But, then they had an idea, they didn’t want to let all of their planning and money to have to go to waste. So they decided to invite 200 of the cities homeless to feast on the four-course meal which had been planned for Tamara’s wedding reception.

Nelson Mandela Passes Away — His Struggle Continues

December 6, 2013 Jerome Roos, www.roarmag.org Educate! Housing, Mandela, Neoliberalism, Poverty, South Africa, Worker Rights and Jobs

Mandela’s country remains torn apart by grinding poverty, rampant inequality, murderous crime, a deadly AIDS epidemic, pervasive political corruption, and a resurgence of brutal state oppression. The story of post-apartheid South Africa, and the mixed legacy of Mandela’s heroic struggle for freedom, must certainly qualify as one of the most authentic tragedies in modern history. As I wrote in a lengthy essay during a visit to Johannesburg last month, a pernicious form of socio-economic apartheid continues to segregate the country into two polar extremes. The newfound vanities of the emerging interracial upper class are mirrored only by the nauseating proliferation of slums on the outskirts of the cities. Apart from the right to vote, not much has changed for the average black South African. Today, 47% of South Africans live in poverty, more than in 1994 when Mandela came to power and made his “unbreakable promise” to eradicate poverty and secure “housing for all”. Two decades later, the amount of South Africans living in slums has doubled.

Students Will March To Stop Huge Trash Incinerator

December 4, 2013 Katharine Cavanaugh, www.popularresistance.org Resist! Chelsea Manning, Climate Change, Environment, Poverty, Racism

December 10 is the Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Here is an update from the United Workers Free Your Voice human rights committee: The United Worker's Free Your Voice human rights committee has been working to stop the nation's largest trash burning incinerator from being built less than a mile from their school and an elementary. Last year, a group of students at Benjamin Franklin High School, who are members of the United Workers human rights committee, learned about a plan to build the nations' largest trash burning incinerator less than a mile from their school. The students were alarmed and decided to take on the issue as the focus of their group.

Popular Resistance Newsletter – We Are In A Class War

November 28, 2013 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.popularresistance.org Newsletter Climate Change, Environment, Finance and the Economy, Poverty, TPP, Worker Rights and Jobs

The struggle of working Americans takes center stage as Black Friday protests cover the country. The struggle for wages that do not leave families impoverished is one that affects us all and highlights the unfair economy created by a class war waged by the wealthy for decades. The ‘Walmartization’ of the US economy has created a downward spiral in wages and destroyed small businesses and communities while heightening the wealth divide that is at the root of so many problems. The people are fighting back and the elites recognize it. There is fear in the investor class as they see people organizing and mobilizing. Corporations are now investing more time and money in preparation to protect themselves from investor actions and legal challenges. The actions of corporations and governments against the people are a sign of their fear, and a sign of our unrealized strength.

Why I Make Terrible Decisions, Or Poverty Thoughts

November 23, 2013 Killer Martinis, www.killermartinis.kinja.com Educate! Poverty

There's no way to structure this coherently. They are random observations that might help explain the mental processes. But often, I think that we look at the academic problems of poverty and have no idea of the why. We know the what and the how, and we can see systemic problems, but it's rare to have a poor person actually explain it on their own behalf. So this is me doing that, sort of. Rest is a luxury for the rich. I get up at 6AM, go to school (I have a full courseload, but I only have to go to two in-person classes) then work, then I get the kids, then I pick up my husband, then I have half an hour to change and go to Job 2. I get home from that at around 1230AM, then I have the rest of my classes and work to tend to. I'm in bed by 3. This isn't every day, I have two days off a week from each of my obligations. I use that time to clean the house and soothe Mr. Martini and see the kids for longer than an hour and catch up on schoolwork.

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